ISSN 1744-7232 (12) Haiku Snowflakes £1
Scotland
Focus on:Leonard McDermid
Leonard McDermid has enjoyed over seventy years of looking at things and over fifty years of commenting upon them in various forms and in a variety of ways.
He left school at fifteen and worked in industry, served two years in the Royal Artillery then worked variously as a papermaker, a lorry, coach and taxi driver and a deep-sea fisherman. In 1956 he went to art college and taught for many years in the Scottish Borders. In 1984 he was appointed as Artist to the Marine Society, undertaking voyages between Ascension and the Falkland Islands. In 1989 he was on tankers in the Arabian Gulf and subsequent voyages have taken him to the Americas and the Far East. In 1997 he co-founded “Rude Mechanicals” teaching technology in many parts of Britain and Ireland.
Leonard’s paintings and constructions have always involved the use of words and letterforms, often the title forming part of the image. In 1990 he founded The Stichill Marigold Press, mainly as a vehicle for his on creations but also as a memorial for letterpress printing, which is fast disappearing after a remarkable five hundred year history. He now finds great satisfaction and joy in being able to take a conception through to finished product entirely under his own influence. The works produced below can never represent the marvelous use of letterforms which marries the poems to other art forms. Full details of all pamphlets and other works can be obtained from The Stichill Marigold Press Eden Cottage, Stichill, Kelso, Roxburghshire TD5 7TA
Letter Seven and Eleven from Thirteen Letters Written On Air
Railway notices and tickets
Look out to the west
there the old familiar shape
that far hill alwaysfrom All Ways
out of peanuts –
hailstones
Focus on:Haibun by David Cobb and Mark Rutter
THREESOME
out of peanuts –
hailstones
melting in the beers
Many days at sundown they meet at the beershop in the leafy outskirts of Chiengmai, sit drinking and talking to each other under a flame-of-the –forest tree. Today the chairs are knocked aside as they rush for cover.
One is a former professional cricketer, kept wicket for Kent, broken knuckles and stubbed finger-ends to show for his trade. Fled here from a nagging wife, he says, and now lives with a local woman who speaks no English.
Then there’s the ex-captain of a Dutch frigate, made up to naval attaché in Moscow, career cut short when his government sacrificed him on a trumped-up NKVD charge that he was a spy. Came East and married a lady of Thai nobility. Couldn’t fit him into her life, so he’s been bankrolled to go to the other end of the country and indulge his wish to become a potter. Has just rediscovered a way of making pink celadon, the recipe for which he claims was lost since the times of Ming. Needs a continuous supply of bee skeps which he burns to ashes.
The third is a painter. In (and on the least excuse, out of) his wallet a newspaper cutting declaring him to be ‘the Gauguin of Bali’. Originally from Switzerland, he often climbs Doi Suthep’s nine thousand feet to an altitude where chanterellesgrow; pickles them for his guest as a snack to go with beer. Gastric explosions. His partner is his buxom model, every Gauguin must have one.
Chatting away the soporific hours, they ignore the one thing they have in common, their rootless unbelonging. Instead, they try to interest each other in tales of miraculous diving catches at the Oval, of things that were burned but didn’t produce a crackly pink glaze, of the guile needed to live on tick while you paint a masterpiece.
the hail peters out –
flame-of–the forest petals
pattern the earth
David Cobb
Maine Journal (XLI)
aurora-borealis-harp playing along the horizon. search–light beams. picked and vibrating strings of spectrum. skaters of light gliding across a cloud ballroom. green flame curtains. water threads. hanging silks.
the light inside the snow
disappearing
disappearing
Marine Journal (XLIV)
april: no budding from the hesitant tree. a single song sparrow’s needle-sharp notes thread the still leafless woods. crows were our winter companions when all other birds deserted us: black ashes flying out of december’s white fire, with blunt picks their songs scraped at the air’s spares lode.
goldfinch song –
eyes follow the notes
into the bare braches
Mark Rutter
1